Beginning Android 2

Chapter 22

Managing and AccessingLocal Databases

SQLite is a very popular embedded database, as it combines a clean SQL interface with a very small memory footprint and decent speed. Moreover, it is public domain, so everyone can use it. Many firms (e.g., Adobe, Apple, Google, Sun, and Symbian) and open source projects (e.g., Mozilla, PHP, and Python) ship products with SQLite.

For Android, SQLite is “baked into” the Android runtime, so every Android application can create SQLite databases. Since SQLite uses a SQL interface, it is fairly straightforward to use for people with experience in other SQL-based databases. However, its native API is not JDBC, and JDBC might be too much overhead for a memory-limited device like a phone, anyway. Hence, ...